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I was recently nominated by a coworker to become our office’s crazy technology lady. It turns out there’s only so many times you can try to explain steampunk or your desk dalek, or nod understandingly when another office’s crazy technology guy mentions breadcrumbs, or expect other people to have seen “that one TED talk about gamification.” Eventually you’ve just painted yourself into a crazy corner. Luckily once you’re there, you get to wear cool glasses frames and everyone takes your word for it when you try to explain the ethos behind open source software.

I don’t feel like I deserve to join the ranks of crazy technology people. Sure, I read Boing Boing over my lunch break, but the last time I spent any time working with HTML was probably to make my Myspace profile even more of a crime against design. Despite my enthusiastic start, I haven’t gotten very far on CodeAcademy. The only reason I know anything about the Moodle platform I may be using at work is long dinner conversations with Karla, a close friend, teacher and early adopter.

But I do want to become a crazy technology lady. To me it’s simple: I value being a good citizen in meatspace, so I should value being a good citizen in the Metaverse. To me, that means learning as much as you can about what’s out there, contributing to it, and sharing the results.

This is my Cadette Girl Scout vest. Trust me, the Junior one was more impressive.

To that end, I want to learn more about how to better create meaningful web content. I discovered the Webmaking 101 course in the process of learning more about badges, with the goal of becoming a badge issuer for a program I staff called the Boards and Commissions Leadership Institute. I really enjoy earning badges of any kind: stars on a chore chart, badges on my Girl Scout vest, lesson badges on Duolingo. So of course I got sidetracked from badges in theory by figuring out how to earn a new kind of badge in practice, and here I am, writing a blog post to complete the first challenge. I’ve got my Badge Backpack on, and I’m ready for the next adventure.

Editor’s note: When I heard that Saint Paul Public Works was having an opening house, I really wanted to go. Unfortunately, I was still in California at the time. Instead, I convinced my mom, Beth Beaty, to go and report back. She generously agreed to write about it for this blog, giving a nice citizen’s perspective on Public Works as a whole.

That was my reaction when the City of Saint Paul’s Public Works Department invited me to “come join the fun!” at their open house via my Twitter feed. In fact, that question is exactly what I asked my daughter Veronica and my boyfriend Aaron when I sent them a copy of the tweet with my snarky commentary. Fun for all ages? How absurd. It was bound to be lame, right? Ooo, look at me . . . I’m such a loser I’m going to the Public Works Equipment Repair Garage for a good time.

Doesn’t that sign just scream “fun”?

However, Veronica (a former Public Works employee) and Aaron (a current City Administrator) thought it sounded great. Some quirk of the fates gave me two policy geeks to love and cherish. I am not a policy geek. I have resigned myself to spend every major holiday meal for the rest of my life asking “What exactly is it you do again?” The only reason I follow the Saint Paul Public Works department is to get Snow Emergency updates.

(Note to non-Minnesotans: A snow emergency is not when you realize there is not enough snow to make the yard look nice for company, so you call the City to deliver some. A snow emergency is when those of us without off-street parking sit around in our pajamas waiting to find out if we need to pull on boots and coats, don mittens and scarves and make our way through snow up to our knees, shovel out our cars so we can move it to the other side of the street before the plows come through and then go to bed and catch some sleep before we need to wake up and to it again before leaving for work.)

So at their urging, and in the hopes I would learn more about their policy geek world, I set off to the open house. Besides, it was on my way home from work.

I haven’t been writing here as often because I’ve been helping to write and edit articles at the OaklandWiki. I love the wiki format because it provides an outlet for my tendency to fight through writer’s block by making my text dense with citations and references to other works. OaklandWiki is just one of the awesome projects that are coming out of the OpenOakland Code for America brigade. It’s a really interesting time to be interested in open data and living in Oakland.

The City of Oakland just launched an open data platform, data.oaklandnet.com. The new website will be the central repository of the City of Oakland’s public data. “Open data platform” can feel like an awfully fancy term for what looks like a bunch of simple spreadsheets liberated from the network drives of city employees. There are lists of foreclosed properties and public art installations. There is tabular data that seems like a section of the Yellow Pages, like the address and telephone numbers for all the Head Start locations in the city.

Most of the real magic happens when information is turned into charts and maps in a unique way or paired with each other to create a new insight.* Oaklanders can view and download information, finding out which City Council district they live in or which police beat their house is on. The website also makes it easy for armchair policy geeks to create, share and discuss visualizations of the data, like by pairing the map of Head Start locations to Census data showing what neighborhoods have a lot of young children to see where another location might be needed. Crime statistics seem to be the most viewed data sets so far, which is a) kind of a shame, since Oakland is so much more than crime and b) a good example of how far Oakland has come about Open Data, given the City’s negative reaction to the creation of Oakland Crime Spotting in 2007.

Folks can also use the site’s API to build software applications. In Boston, one such application is the Adopt a Fire Hydrant, a map-based web app that lets people take responsibility for shoveling snow out from around a fire hydrant in their neighborhood. Oakland is adapting that code for an Adopt a Drain program. In San Francisco, data from the Public Works Department was parlayed into an app that lets you identify the species of tree planted in any boulevard. How cool would that be for Oakland, a city full of places named for street trees?

This push towards making data publicly available is also helping the City think about how it collects and stores data internally. For example, want access to the pedestrian counts that are collected during traffic studies? Too bad. There’s no consistent archival method for them, so no one person or department can release them, even if they want to. I think this is a good little object lesson about how governments aren’t nearly as obstructionist as folks tend to think. It isn’t that some public employee is sitting on the data you want and thumbing their nose at you, it’s that the people who collect data don’t necessarily think it will have a use beyond the immediate and internal, and thus don’t keep it around. The more the public can communicate what data it wants, the more the government can make sure its collected in a consistent, centralized way to make it releasable.

That conversation about what datasets should be added next has certainly begun. Data.Oaklandnet allows users to request datasets directly, and I was surprised to see that the only thing requested so far is something I myself have often wished for — the records from ShotSpotter, the “acoustic surveillance system” that alerts Oakland police to gunfire in certain neighborhoods. My friends and I have a long-running dream of being able to access a website that will answer the question “What’s That Noise in Oakland?” Is it gunfire? Fireworks? Back-firing cars? And maybe if that requester gets access to a ShotSpotter API, that website will become a reality.

I think that’s the best part the movement towards opening up government data. The City doesn’t have to try to anticipate all the public’s desires and spend time producing every possible fancy map. Instead, it can give people the resources to do it themselves. rather than pitting “innovation” against things like street paving on the to-do list of governments, coming up with new ideas and insights becomes a joyful and collaborative process for all kinds of engaged citizens, small businesses and recreational data visualizers.

* I’ve also been reading The Ghost Map, the story of Dr. John Snow’s dot map of cholera cases and water pumps during the London epidemic of 1854. It does an excellent job of filling me with awe for the power of open data, mapping and good old fashioned detective work.

I’ve become part of a profession where the U.S. Census Bureau’s data release dates are celebrated like mini-holidays. Each data product is a little wrapped gift, and size of the informational presents to be found within has little to do with how big the package is. Mostly recently, my department reveled in the 2011 American Community Survey data. As I mentioned before, the ACS is the source of data on commute modes, among other things, so it was hardly surprising that the Bicycling and Pedestrian Facilities Program tore the wrapping off that package eagerly.

Take that, Tuscon!

And what a present it contained! According to the survey, bicycle commuting in Oakland is at an all-time high. Oakland now has the seventh highest rate of bicycling of the 100 largest cities in the country. Take that, Tuscon! Five thousand Oaklanders commute by bicycle, and increase of over 250 percent since 2000. And remember, that’s only people for whom bicycling is the primary mode of transportation to work — it doesn’t include people who only bike in on Mondays, or bike to a bus stop or BART station, or drive to work but bike to shop.

After a flurry of emails, margin of error checks and hasty chart-making, we drafted a press release, which is available in its entirety here. Because what good is a present if you can’t show it off? It’s gratifying it see Oakland’s investment in bike lanes, boulevards, parking, racks, and other infrastructure pay off. Maybe if I can get a certain fellow MPP to tune up my bike, I can add a thousandth of a percent to next year’s mode share estimate.

It’s important to have aspirations. I’m still in the very first stages of learning things about GIS. So far, most of what I’ve done is make choropleth maps slightly better than an over-achieving 9th grader with a big box of colored pencils. I’m excited to learn more though, and to that end I’ve started keeping a file of amazing maps. Some are obvious-in-retrospect simple, some are look-at-it-for-days complex and some, well, some are just beautiful.

Check out this Geologic Map of the Near Side of the Moon:

Geologic Map of the Near Side of the Moonby Don E. Wilhelms and John F. McCauley (1971)(U.S. Geological Survey map I-703)

I mean, I have an affinity for moon maps*. My room is decorated with two pull-out maps from 1970’s National Geographics. But this one is worth ordering a print and then planning your room around it, at least to me. It’s not terribly informative without it’s legend (which is another neat little piece of data visualization, all laid out in a table). But it still manages to give a sense of the moon’s contours and elevations. But mostly, its just gorgeous.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to take a tour of the Bay Bridge Seismic Safety projects. The tour was organized through the

I was pretty excited, as you can see.

local chapter of Women in Transportation, which regularly offers tours of infrastructure projects in the area, in addition to hosting some great happy hours.

The event began with a somewhat over-produced promotional video about how the bridge was going to be “one of the engineering marvels of the world,” as demonstrated with montages of construction work set to electric guitar riffs. Of course every major project wants you to know that it is something never-before-seen, challenging and amazing. But as the presentation progressed to a more technical video, I began to understand how unique the project really is.

Once completed, the self-anchored suspension span of the bridge will be the largest of its kind in the world. That design was selected by the public as the “signature element” of the bridge, which is more aesthetically in keeping with other structures on the Bay and quite a bit less boxy and prison-like than the current bridge. Self-anchored suspension bridges have one continuous loop of cable anchored to the roadway, supported by (in this case) a single tower. Our tour guide likened it to an arm in a sling, where your arm is the deck of the bridge, and your shoulder is the tower. The cable was installed one strand at a time, and all 137 strands are anchored individually.

The whole description of the project is riddled with superlatives. The tower is so massive that a crane had to be specially designed and fabricated to install it. The cable saddle is the world’s largest. Deck sections were moved into place with straddle carriers used by NASA to move shuttles. The whole affair will be one of the biggest public works projects in US history at $6.4 billion.

Given the scope of the project, I was glad to have had it explained before we got on the boat. It was difficult to see the details of features like the hinge pipe beams that connect bridge sections and allow the sections to move relative to each other in the case of a major earthquake.

The parallel decks of the Skyway section are on the left and the beginning of the self-anchored suspension span on the right. The existing Bay Bridge is in the background.

Being so up close and personal with the bridge did allow me to see some other parts I never would have noticed. Like the “cormorant condos” — nesting platforms for the double-crested cormorants that seem to really enjoy living under the existing bridge. Since the cormorants were recently an endangered species, CalTrans is doing everything it can to encourage them onto the nesting platforms, building nesting houses and putting up decoy cormorants to try and lure the real ones to the new structure. We also got to squint at the Bay Bridge Troll, who is now destined for a museum.

Overall, the event was a blast. I didn’t know very much about bridges going in, or this project in particular. Now at least I have a grasp on this bridge in particular.

Bridge construction has had to avoid damaging this little former torpedo storehouse.

Looking up at the tower for the SAS span. The tower has four legs, each of which are composed of four pieces welded and bolted together.

Hinge pipe beam connecting the Skyway to the SAS span.

Looking up at the bottom of the SAS deck, you can see the cormorant condos, complete with decoys.

The lighting for the SAS span was designed by the same company that lights the Statue of Liberty. The lights face in the direction cars are going, so they light to roadway like headlights would, without glaring into drivers’ eyes.

The suspender ropes connect the bridge span to the cable. At the time of the tour, they were in the process of being tightened.

The parallel decks of the Skyway.

It amazed me to see how the bridge decks could seem so complete, but still have, y’know, huge gaps.

As interesting as all the temporary structures are — the falsework, the crew platforms — I’m excited to see the bridge’s final silhouette.

The cable is composed of 137 strands, each made up of 127 wires.

The boat ride also gave us a great view of the container cranes that are emblematic of Oakland’s port.